OSNews

With all respect, what we have now works well enough. You're not forced to upgrade. The new features are significant enough to warrant a new version, and the upgrade price is very reasonable, especially in the UK

I was with you there for a second but then I thought about our own experience so far with Parallels. The company I work for recently started in earnest to develop for the Mac. We have a number of clients who use Macs requests for a native Mac version have increased lately.

In the mean time, we have serval people who are using Parallels and we have been using it as well. To be perfectly honest, 2.0 has not quite met our expectations. Our primary complaint is it's ability to handle data over serial connections but aside from that, the software has been a bit troublesome (buggy, crashing to the point where I have to kill the process).

If 3.0 solves our problems, then great, we'll bite the bullet. But then again, paying money for bug fixes makes it feel a bit too much for paying for a beta, not a finished product. At least I can just demo 3.0 to see if it is worth the upgrade.

Parallels is not really a business solution. If you're looking for a rock solid dependable engine, VMWare's Fusion Beta is probably the better long term bet.

Parallels moves quickly, is bleeding edge and comes with the problems such a development style has.

Agreed, but it's Parallels that our customers have been using so that is what we have been testing with. I'll take a look at the VMWare Fusion Beta and see if that is a better solution.

So it's Parallels fault that you bought your copy when you did? That's a bit harsh. Maybe you should have did some research and then waited for this release?

Edited 2007-06-01 16:01

How do you expect them to pay developers to develop the new version? You either you pay for each version or you pay a Red Hat et al. style service fee that entitles you to updates as long as you are subscribed.
Those of us that bought Parallels before Christmas get free updates for a year...

I know what you mean, I recently bought the Brood Wars expansion pack for Starcraft, then a week later they announce Starcraft 2?!?!?!? I was disgusted.

"Parallels Inc is offering $10 off the normal upgrade price to existing registered users of Parallels for a week only, bringing the cost down to $US39.99 ($A48.28). After this time, upgrades will cost $49.99 and full licences will cost $79.99. It will give the upgrade away free to customers who purchased Parallels after May 1, 2007."

Yea, I'll readily fork over the upgrade charge if this lets modern games run on my Mac. I mean, seriously, this is the "last mile" for folks who may not want to run on a mac.

The Mac already runs World of Warcraft, so I've been content, but it will be nice to open up other options.

On the other side of the coin, this could also be the final nail in the arguments for game companies to make Mac ports of anything.

I'm not worried about office or personal apps, Macs have lots of those. But now game companies can legitimately punt on the whole problem.

So, it's a double edged sword.

I don't know about that. I'm inclined to think that companies would want to have native ports due to speed issues. Sure Paraells is quick on its feet, but it's not going to quite meet native speed because it can't quite take advantage of what native code can offer. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.

I think WOW would be a great test. On the same machine do some performance tests to see how it runs natively and how it runs in Windows using Paraells. Hopefully I will have the opportunity to do this test in the near future.

Anyway, if I bought a Mac for personal use it would be great if I could run my Windows only games.

I've actually seen instances where Windows XP was running faster in Linux under and emulator, than it did on the hardware alone, using the same system config.

Not everybody is going to buy a £160 Windows licence, and then Parallels, just to play games on Mac.

Parallels 3 shows there is solid demand for games on the Mac - one way or another. Game companies will see that such demand exists and it will improve the chances of native games being produced.

>Not everybody is going to buy a £160 Windows licence, and then Parallels, just to ...

That sounds like the retail edition; does the OEM edition have problems or driver gaps that make it unsuitable?

A

Where does Joe user purchase an OEM copy from a shelf, such as how they buy the games they intend to play?

Playing games in VMs is a limited subset of users with a copy of Windows, and Parallels / Fusion.

There's better hope for Cider / Wine / Ports.

---

OEM edition is the same as retail but comes without box, and can only be bought online with the purchase of memory or hard disk.

Edited 2007-06-01 17:46

Why do people read books? Watch movies? Watch TV? It's entertainment. It's a hobby. For some, a serious hobby. That's why it is important to get games working on various platforms.

It's important to people, therefore companies are interested because where there's interest, there's potential revenue to be generated.

So just because you aren't interested in something it is completely impossible for you to understand why anybody else would be interested in that thing? The world isn't you, you know.

How does it compare to Codeweaver’s Crossover?

Good question. How fast would a completely virtualized OS running, say, Office 2003, as opposed to WINE running Office 2003?

I imagine WINE would still be faster, if by only a little bit. With something like Office 2003, I doubt the difference would be significant, but with games, it could be a fair difference.

your experience of virtualization softaware is probably a bit outdated. I use VirtualBox on Linux, which is free, works reliably and is a perfect complement to my Linux.

It misses the possibility of running 3D games but you cannot describe him as "bugged" or "expensive".

Yes, but only DirectX 8.1.

I think Mac owners are just aware as PC owners what they're gaming specs are. I have a MacBookPro 2.16GHz, 128MB ATI X1600, 1GB RAM and I can run Tomb Raider Anniversary at 1440x900 at highest settings. Macs are not /that/ incapable. Even a GMA950 can play WoW.